GER 407 Seminar: Poetic Justice (Fall 2006)

This course will focus on a small selection of German prose texts in which questions of justice are addressed: Johannes von Tepl, Der Ackermann und der Tod, Heinrich von Kleist, Der Findling, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Die Judenbuche and Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie. The emphasis will be on close, careful readings of these works. Requirements: regular, prepared attendance; two five-page papers. Readings, discussion and written assignments in German.

COLT 407 Literary Landscape (Spring 2006)

The word “paradise” comes from an ancient Persian word meaning “garden” or “orchard.” Taking the intersection of these concepts as a starting point, this course will examine “literary landscape” in two, equally important senses: (1) the literary (verbal) portrayal of a natural setting or view; (2) the painterly representation of landscapes invested with—and ultimately divested of—mythological, allegorical, moral, emblematic or narrative meaning. We will focus on parallel and often reciprocally defining developments in literature and painting, our aim being that of both better understanding these particular artistic forms and grasping (to flirt with a contradiction) the “nature of the aesthetic.” The eventual emergence of nature as a value unto itself will provide a historical coordinate for such topics as the following: transformations in garden architecture; perspective and the history of topographical painting; the appearance of the word “landscape” and its cognates (e.g. “horizon”); the Enlightenment and the primacy of vision; art and the “control of nature”; Romanticism and the invention of the “pure prospect.” In addition to considering the history of landscape painting generally, we will pay particular attention to Claude (Lorrain), Jacob Ruisdael, Thomas Constable, J. W. M. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich. We will also view Peter Greenaway’s 1982 Film The Draughtsman’s Contract.

GER 625 Translations/Transformations (Winter 2007)

The translation of Shakespeare into German, beginning with Wieland’s eight-volume prose translation (1762-66) and achieving a pinnacle with A. W. Schlegel’s verse rendering (edited by Tieck, 1825-33), was crucial to the emergence of the literary-national identity of the German-speaking peoples. Focusing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and criticism, this seminar will entertain the notion that the history of German literature is tantamount to the history of the German reception of Shakespeare. We will consider critical works by J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, Herder, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck, literary works by Lessing, Wieland, Goethe and Kleist. Students will be asked to have read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in advance of the course. A trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland may be included.

HUM 103 Venice and Dresden: Tales of Two Cities

Venice and Dresden—two cities that fascinate in part because of their respective association with slow decline and outright devastation—will provide us with a loose construction for considering social, artistic and intellectual developments that help define “the Modern.” A careful reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice will frame a discussion of middle-class liberation within the context of commercial adventurism and urban organization. We will examine transformations in painting, from the almost photographic precision of Canaletto and Bellotto (the latter a Venetian who served as court painter in Dresden for twenty years) to the Romanticism of J.W.M. Turner (not to mention Lord Byron). After a discussion of Don Giovanni in the context of the French Revolution (Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, was from Venice), we will look at Richard Wagner, musical director in Dresden up to the revolution of 1848 (in response to which Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice will exemplify for us the modern habit of associating beauty with disease. We will conclude with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, set partly in Dresden during the catastrophic bombing of February 13 th, 1945.

COLT 607 Picture Theory (Fall 2005)

What is a picture? This question is posed by Lacan as part of a discussion that presses issues of pictorial representation through an understanding of natural mimicry and links imitation to a fascination prone to “capturing” the viewer in the field of vision. The assertion that we are photo-graphed, i.e., determined by a gaze that is “outside,” has broad implications for an essentially Western mode of painting whose defining aim was long that of disentangling the spectator from the spectacle. Artist and spectator alike are instituted as external bystanders in a process of sublimation whose gain is the erasure of (social) origin. Barthes’ discussion of the manner in which the photographer’s finger, in tripping the shutter, restores to the image the contingency of its creation is suggestive for a tradition in which the sketch would gradually emerge as a form that revels in process and approximation. Like the fingerprint proper, the residual trace of the artist’s hand outlines an evidentiary lineage connecting Barthes’ punctum to Auerbach’s “Scar of Odysseus”—wounds whose discovery exposes a basic kinship between mimesis and camouflage, between representation and disguise.

Individual meetings will be organized around specific forms and techniques employed in the interest of effacement (of the artist, the process, the apparatus, the social field): linear perspective, anamorphosis, trompe l’oeil, the mask, self-portraiture, realism (surrealism), mise-en-scène, the shot/reverse shot in cinema, etc. Particular presentations on Chaplin and Hitchcock are foreseen. Other topics include the sister arts controversy and the rise of modern theater. More or less recent theoretical treatments of the visual and pictorial will be routed back through the work of earlier scholars whose role in developing the comparative study of representations was key.

COLT 614 Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature (Fall 2006)

Intended as a reconsideration of the place of comparative literature within a global, pluralistic curriculum, this seminar will take its cue from the geographical and cartographic metaphors that pervade critical vocabularies. Critical-theoretical discussions will be mapped onto a selection of narratives originally used as a freshman introduction to the field. There, careful readings of key passages from Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno provided a repertoire of figural coordinates for understanding how literary adventures help structure the experience of the world. Additional readings included Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, and Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight. In tandem with these and other literary texts, we will consider the critical work of Erich Auerbach, Homi Bhabha, Re Chow, S. Freud, Georg Lukács, J. Hillis Miller and Franco Moretti.

COLT 102 Introduction to Comparative Literature II (Winter 2007)

With an emphasis on the social components of literature and its institutions, this course will orbit loosely around the words ghetto and bourgeois, the histories of which point to the role of the enclave in the formation of communities. Their potential for ambiguity—the fact that these words can carry both positive and negative connotations—make them useful indicators of the complexity that defines the ever shifting boundary between “inside” and “outside.” This boundary will prove important for us, for it is here that the kindred processes of assimilation and differentiation take shape. An introductory analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” which recounts a black man’s attempt to move his family onto “a street of bitter white,” will serve to introduce the concept of the vernacular as it relates to distinctions of race and class. This will in turn help lay the groundwork for a sustained investigation of the common tongue and its role in linking the boundary between inside and out to that between “high” and “low.” Following a brief discussion of Aristotle’s association of comedy with the lower classes, we will move through a series of moments in which the “low” is sometimes stigmatized, sometimes mined as a source of creative vitality (the latter of which can itself be a stigma). These include: Dante’s choice of vernacular Italian for his Divine Comedy; Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into vernacular German; the ghetto in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the aristocracy’s ridicule of the ascendant merchant class in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman; class and sexuality in Strindberg’s Miss Julie; the materiality of language in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; wealth and assimilation in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; the “pain that words contain” in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight.” Certain films may also be considered, including Mike Figgis’ 1999 production of the Strindberg play. A look at Charlie Chaplin should give a sense of how the attempt to “break into” society’s mainstream can degenerate into a comedic variation on the intrusion for which Brooks’ Rudolph Reed pays a heavy toll.